seekingferret | Entries tagged with worldcon

I am back from Worldcon! It was, as usual, A LOT.

I flew out of Boston Tuesday night, got to my hotel around 11PM, which in my head was 2AM. It was the start of a lot of long days where my East Coast brain would wake me early and my con-going heart would try to keep me awake late to see as much as possible. But I never did go to any of the evening parties.

DW People I saw included

gwyn,

beatrice_otter,

mecurtin,

wickedwords,

elf,

batyatoon, and probably more I am forgetting. I did not get to spend as much time talking to them as I wanted, but it was great to see so many people.

Wednesday morning I got my badge early, then I took a bus out to U-City to rent a bicycle for the next two days. It was a Kona hybrid, a nice aluminum framed bike with sturdy shifters and disc brakes. I liked it a lot more than my own current bike, I'm thinking of getting one.

Biking in Seattle was fun but the downtown sure is hilly. I biked about 25 miles over the two days I had the bike, and I also probably walked the bike up close to a mile of hills I didn't feel up to climbing. So I have mixed feelings about the plan, it was nice to have the transit speed and flexibility the bike gave me, but I definitely overtaxed myself and sapped energy that could have gone to other con activities. An ebike might have been the wiser choice.

I got back to the con only to realize I had lost my badge. I think when I left the con I took my mask and badge off simultaneously and the badge must have missed my pocket. I went to registration and after some being directed to different stations, found that some lovely person had found and turned in my badge. Whew!

I was on 4 panels about fanfic and they were all really fun to be a part of. I also attended a couple more panels on fanfic, there was so much and it was great that none of the panels had to be THE load bearing panel; there were a bunch of times when we could say, for more on that check out this other panel.

I did a workshop on making maps with watercolors. I'm not sure why I signed up for this other than just wanting some sort of crafty time, but it was fun even though I was not that good, and maybe I need to do more painting. The cool but frustrating thing about watercolors is how they surprise you and do things you didn't expect they would do on the page. I don't love the map I made, but I think I can get a D&D oneshot out of it.

There was a Jewish fan meetup, which was amazingly heterogeneous in perspective and yet had this lovely vibe of kindness and openness and comfort. Several people were saying it was the most comfortable they'd felt since October 7th, to be in a room of people who understood them as Jews and Fans. We also had fannish Kabbalat Shabbat (nusach arisia) with about 30 people, and 15 or so came back for a morning Shabbat service. We had a Lecha Dodi to an adaptation of the Firefly theme and a Jurassic Park Adon Olam.

Sunday morning I hosted a crossword meetup. We had about 15 people, which is pretty good for the morning after the Hugos. I announced that I was there to evangelize cryptic crosswords and we pulled together a group of about 5 people, 2 who were total cryptic newbies, to solve the latest Square Chase variety cryptic. Meanwhile the rest of the people solved various other American crosswords I brought.

Program highlights included Ada Palmer reading from Hearthfire, Brandon Sanderson reading from the new Mistborn series, academic panels on the evolution of robots in fiction from RUR to Murderbot, and on the monastic tradition in SFF, and Leigh Bardugo, Holly Black, Matt Ruff, Caitlin Rozakis, and Nicholas Binge talking about what it was like to have their books adapted for the screen.

I didn't do as much touristing as I wanted, but also I'd hit most of the most obvious Seattle sites I really wanted to see when I was here for the Spokane Worldcon ten years back. I did take a nice walk in the Olympia Sculpture Garden Shabbos morning, and I saw a lot more of the city, just qua city, because of the bike.

And then my flight home, which was already kind of precariously late to go to work the next day, was delayed an hour. I got home at 2:30 AM Monday and somehow dragged myself to work but I was a zombie who did no functional work that day.

Anyway, that was Worldcon. It was great but too much and so I'm thinking I'll skip LA next year and do more relaxing vacations.

I've done this exercise some past years (2020 2019, I've also written up a few Philcons, I think...), mostly to show how inadequate and silly the treatment of fanfic has been at past Worldcons. But here's the list of all of the fanfic panels at the Seattle Worldcon, and it's frankly incredible. It's such a diverse group of panel topics, covering history, technique, craft, culture, community. I'm excited to be on a couple of these panels myself, and to attend some of the others. The team who came up with them and got them onto the schedule deserves all the kudos.

Full Program for Seattle Worldcon

Fix-It Fic
The “fix-it fic” is a staple of the fanfic community, but why do we write it? What do we get out of it? What tropes are fix-it fic writers drawn to, and how can it be done well? What happens when the fanfic is better than the show, and how do small tweaks in canon lore to “fix” canon mistakes change everything?

Star Trek and Fanfic
The earliest modern fanfic arose in the mid-1960s, while the original Star Trek was still on the air. It’s often called the ur-fandom in fanfic communities, even though the roots of fanfic can be traced to Homer or earlier. What made Trek fanfic different from the earlier stories-about-stories, and what’s made it so enduring?

Filk and Fanfic: Two Great Tastes
Filk and fanfic cover some of the same ground: character studies, missing scenes, genre twists (from dramatic to funny or vice-versa), new stories in an existing universe, adding a sexy twist, or shifting the POV character. Sometimes, they don’t use a single character or event from the original, but everyone recognizes it as specific commentary. Come explore what else these two often-neglected types of fan works have in common.

Is That Fanfic?
Some books that might be “fanfic” aren’t called fanfic: Unauthorized spinoffs (Wicked, Wide Sargasso Sea, The Wind Done Gone), sequels by different authors (most comic books), and authorized books based on TV series. It’s not limited to text: Gaming mods for video games, role-playing games in licensed settings (Middle Earth, Call of Cthulhu), and fan-made games like Jumpchain also put a new spin on existing content. Are they types of fanfic? What else would we call “I made a story about someone else’s story?”

Building Writing Skills Through Fan Fiction
Before we write, we read, and often, it’s our favorite stories and characters that inspire us to be writers in the first place. Whether you stick with fan fiction or not, fan fiction is a place where young writers can play in a familiar sandbox, honing their skills and building their own authorial voice. Which fanfic writing skills translate directly to pro-writer skills—and what fanfic skills don’t connect to commercial markets at all?

ao3 mcu a:aou a.b.o. bdsm ot3 hs au pwp
Do you know what the title of this panel means? Come learn about the specialized vocabulary of fanfic: how and why the abbreviations and other terms get invented, and how that language works to build and sustain fanfic communities. (The kink tomato is not a food; dead dove is not a bird. Does “HS” stand for high school or Homestuck?)

Filing Off the Serial Numbers
Plenty of fanfic authors have “filed off the serial numbers” and republished their fic as mainstream stories. The most famous is Fifty Shades of Grey, but the Vorkosigan Saga began as Star Trek fanfic. What works, and what doesn’t? Is this a reasonable career-starter for new would-be pro writers? Are there any tips to make it work better or any traps to avoid?

What Is the OTW/AO3?
In 2007, Astolat blogged that fanfic writers need an archive of their own, not beholden to corporate interests and censorship. Eighteen years after the Organization for Transformative Works (OTW) started it, the Archive of Our Own (AO3) is going strong, with a Hugo Award in 2019, and now over 4 million users and 14 million works. Come find out how it happened, how it works, how you can find what you want to read—and, if you’re interested, how to get involved.

Fanfic as Therapy
Fanfic isn’t just writing practice or sharing ideas about what happens next when the series is over—it’s also used to explore personal emotions and reactions to trauma. Come discuss the therapeutic value of fanfic as both writers and readers in a moderated open discussion rather than a traditional panel.

What *Is* Fanfiction, Anyway?
What is fanfic, and why is it important to science fiction fandom? Panelists will discuss the history of fanfiction and its connections to SFF fandom, what makes it different from authorized spinoffs, and how the fanfic community perceives itself.

Licenced TTRPGs as Fanfic
TTRPGs have a long history of media-licensed game systems: Call of Cthulhu, Marvel Universe, Middle Earth Role-Playing, and dozens of lesser-known games for TV shows or movies. Panelists will explore the connections and differences between “Let’s play a game in this setting” and “I want to write a story in this setting.”

Fanfic Community as Gift Economy
The pros and cons of an artistic community with a strong non-economic, even anti-commercial, bias. How fanfic works outside of writing markets, and what happens when fanfic writers go pro. This will be a moderated group discussion, rather than a regular panel—everyone can participate.

Not Just Training Wheels
Fanfic is often claimed to be “good practice” on one’s route to becoming a professional author, but this is not the only reason people write fanfic. Panelists will discuss some of the others: bonding with a community, exploring story concepts with very niche appeal, enjoying a personal fantasy, and more.

Fanfic on Paper
From mimeograph with staples or comb-binding to small runs of offset printing and artisanal fanbindings with custom covers, fanfic has never been published like other literature. Find out how it used to be done, how it shifted to digital publishing, and how it’s shared on paper now. We’ll look at the history of fanzines and the current fanbinding hobby, the ethics of publishing in a niche community, and the controversies of commercialization.

Making It Gay… or Trans, Neurodivergent, BIPOC, and More
In a media world that too often does not represent women, queerness, BIPOC identities, neurodivergence, or people with disabilities, it’s no wonder we choose to represent ourselves and/or our desires in the fanfic we write. This panel isn’t about why we take cishet characters and make them gay, trans, or a dozen other things; it’s about why we should and the freedom and joy that goes with knowing we can.

The Absent S: (Fem)Slash and Sapphics
When most people hear slash, they think man-and-man (M/M), but in modern parlance the term actually applies to any “ship” that is same-sex. In some fandoms, femslash is the main “ship”! Let’s talk about the differences between F/F and M/M fanfic and fandoms, how femslash is often overlooked or looked down upon in fandom (even when it’s the main “ship” of certain fandoms!), and what femslash means to sapphics in fandom.

Dipping One Toe In: First-Time Fanfic
Have you never read fanfic or are a little interested but are not sure where to start? Come to this panel, where our set of talented and friendly experts will try to give you recommendations—suggestions on which fandoms, authors, and fics might be right up your alley.

Reclamation Through Fanfiction
Fanfiction often ignores the canon setting and relationships to tell stories the original creators never intended. But can it ignore the setting’s creator? From Lovecraft to Rowling to Gaiman, many authors of beloved works are later discovered to be prejudiced or predatory or both. Can fanfiction be used to take back some of these works and put distance between the author and the art?

Smut for Fun, Not Profit
Fanfic erotica is so famous that many believe it’s all of fanfic. Learn how the tropes and styles of kinky and erotic topics change when they are written by and for a shared community. Let’s discuss how kinky writing changes when there’s no potential of commercial activity and it’s all about what gets you hot and what gets your readers hot.

A bunch of friends are in Glasgow right now and I miss y'all. I had hoped to be there, but unfortunately with the new job and an unluckily weekday heavy Jewish holiday schedule this year, I couldn't justify the vacation time to go to Worldcon. But I've been attending virtually where I can, and volunteering online as well.

I am sitting at my desk half-watching the Hugos and half working on clipping panel videos so they can be posted for later rewatch- finishing up my last shift of the con. The breadth of Glasgow Worldcon's programming is tremendous and the hard work they've put in to making it work in a substantially hybrid way is incredibly impressive, tech glitches and all.

Hopefully I will make it to Seattle next year!

I've written several times about how much I love Ann and Jeff Vandermeer's The Kosher Guide to Imaginary Animals. But also my wish that it were more detailed in its halachic analysis. I've said I wanted to write a commentary for years, but I hadn't gotten very far in that work beyond doing background Talmud and Torah study.

WOOF is the Worldcon APA (Amateur Press Association), a style of fanzine where writers writer whatever they want and print enough copies to distribute to all the other contributors. An editor then collates all the contributions and sends them out to everyone who participated. When I saw the announcement this year I decided to use it as motivation to really start the project. I wrote some analysis for all of the animals in the Imaginary Guide that begin with the letter A. Then I typeset the thing in LaTeX and submitted it for WOOF. My first ever fanzine contribution!

My goal is still to complete a commentary on the whole book, but that will take time and energy, better to do it in little chunks. I'm really pleased with what I do have, the writing feels tonally appropriate and gets at a whole array of different halachic concepts beyond what people usually talk about when they talk about these kinds of questions.

The official WOOF version will be up on the web at... some point? But you can read Sefer Chayot Agadiyot Volume 1 from this google drive link.

Working as a Runner at Worldcon was my first experience being Mask Police. I had mixed feelings about it; I have already written here about my ambivalence about masking as a COVID mitigation strategy: I'm not convinced by the evidence that it has much impact, compared to vaccination, testing, therapeutics, distancing and other mitigation strategies, but I'm not unconvinced enough to stop wearing it in indoor spaces, so I am still consistently masking in indoor spaces. In any case, even if I were an enthusiastic mask supporter, it's never fun to go around telling people to do things they don't want to do.

Chicon had, by report, 3,574 warm bodies attending. It required proof of vaccination at registration and required masking at all times in all con spaces with the exception of one area of the con suite that was for unmasked eating, and with the exception of brief mask removals for drinking liquids in hallways. And I would say that in my observation, 95% of the time, people held by those rules. But there were also hotel staff, hotel visitors, residents of the attached apartment building... and none of them were required to wear masks. And everyone was free to unmask when they were off con premises. So the policy was inherently limited in effect.

The remaining 5% of the time, among con members, was my problem. I'm not a very confrontational person in real life, I save my troll energy for the internet. I tried to be polite but present it as a fait accompli that they were in the wrong. My standard phrase was "Excuse me, could I please ask you to put your mask back on?" 'Back on', implying, of course, that they had previously had it on, which wasn't always the case. But by saying 'back on', I was treating them as if we were in a world where of course they knew that they needed to be wearing a mask, I wasn't going to be taking any argument on that point.

Most of this was people who had just come from outside or their hotel room and had simply forgotten to put their mask on. These people were easy to deal with, I asked them to put their mask back on, they said of course, and they put it back on. On the first day I also dealt with a few people who somehow hadn't realized that Chicon had a mask requirement, or at least disingenuously claimed that they hadn't realized. I guided a few of them to the Ops office where we gave them a mask and told them they would need to provide masks for the rest of the con and all seemed well from that point on; One person yelled at me and then ran away before I could take his badge number down, but it's possible he really was just confused, I guess.

My biggest problem was with people who circumvented the intent of the drinking rule by carrying a drink with them and periodically taking a sip as they walked. That itself was a violation of the policy, but it was difficult to confront these people, because they were generally moving and I had to make a calculation about whether by the time I reached them they would have put their mask back on and wasted my time. In theory I could have reported them to Ops for the violation anyway, but we were trying to operate in a mode of asking for cooperation rather than being punitive, especially with first time violators. And tie this in to my general skepticism of masks: If someone was blatantly in violation of the policy I would stop them, but in gray areas I would wonder how much of a difference it made, and I'd be willing to let things slide a bit if it seemed likely they'd be putting their mask back on pretty soon and save me a confrontation.

I also walked past a Table Talk where the author, a venerable and much beloved figure in our community, was unmasked and all the attendees were masked. I paused for a moment but ultimately let it slide. I figured everyone there knew what they were doing, if they wanted to kill one of the most famous writers in SFF and he was willing to die, let it be; I didn't want to be the one to yell at him. Maybe that's a failure on my part.

So far, Chicon has reported 41 COVID positives, with the number likely to increase over the next few days but probably not massively. That is slightly over 1% of the attending population. That's... not so great! Then again, everyone at the convention was fully vaccinated so the risk of serious harm from a 1% positive rate ought to be down fairly low. I think if I had known going in that I had a roughly 2% chance of getting COVID from the con, I still would have gone. All of these risk assessments are so hard to make. It's hard to know if 2% is a good number or a bad number- most of the cons that aren't as diligent about requiring masks are also not as diligent about receiving and retransmitting positive rest reports- there are stories coming out of Dragon*Con that they dropped the mask mandate halfway through the con because they didn't have the manpower or equipment to enforce it (which is horrifying from a operations point of view even aside from the public health side of it), but I haven't seen any stats on COVID rates at Dragon*Con and am not sure there will be any made public. Discon had a final positivity rate of 1.13%. Balticon had something like a half percent.

*shrug* I dunno.

EDIT: Final report has it at 60 cases.

My outgoing travel was easier than I expected, though I busted my suitcase shlepping it down the stairs from the El, so that is annoying.

Thursday I picked up some groceries, then grabbed my badge and started a shift as an Ops runner, which meant wandering around the con being a Visible Person on Staff and answering questions about where things are and seeing if any problems were cropping up. It also meant being Mask Police, about which I have complicated feelings, but nearly everyone I talked to had no problem putting a mask on when asked politely.

After that, I had a quick lunch and then did my first panel, which was the one about lab safety. I think it went well, we had a good mix of panelists with lots of stories about safety incidents, and we had an audience full of even more good stories they were happy to share.

Then I did another Ops shift, then caught the tail end of a panel about how to balance how much science belongs in an SFF story. Then I took an ebike up to North Chicago and picked up dinner from the southernmost kosher restaurant in Chicago, then headed back down and ate and then slept.

Friday morning I had an early Ops shift. I caught some of the business meeting, then had my second panel, on fanfic skills not related to writing, which was a little uneven but I think on the whole successful. My co-panelists were Foz Meadows and Seanan McGuire, so honestly I didn't really need to do the heavy lifting.

Then I ran my 5E D&D game "Carting Wars", inspired by the delightfully terrible reality TV show Shipping Wars, which I had a lot of fun doing. There's probably another post brewing about the style of rpg oneshot that Carting Wars and Zoo Adventure comprise, which I would like to see more of. One of the players afterward told me that he hadn't expected it to be fun when I first laid out the premise, but by the end he was totally into it, and I think indeed there is something extremely counterintuitive about adventures where logistics are the plot hooks, but it makes for a very satisfying convention game IMO.

Afterward I took a break from the con for awhile, then rejoined things for Friday night services (Nusach Arisia) followed by a kiddush organized by one of the attendees. I stayed there for a few hours shmoozing about Judaism and fandom before dinner and sleep.

Saturday I didn't have any program or ops responsibilities so I actually could enjoy the con. I went to the business meeting in the morning, then in the afternoon I camped out in the panel rooms for a while, for panels on Libraries in SFF, Hopepunk, and Silkpunk. After grabbing a quick dinner I then left the con and went to the Chicago Jazz Festival, free concerts in Millennium Park. I saw Carmen Lundy and then the first part of the William Parker Quintet's show. I actually saw William Parker play the Stone fifteen or so years ago, it was cool to see him again in a wildly different venue. I preferred the show at the Stone, though.

I returned to the con for trivia, which was brutally difficult in a fun and satisfying way- I got 36/90 and that only put me about six or seven questions off from the winner. Afterward I popped up to the party floors for the first time and talked to some people, but I wasn't super into it so I went back down to go to sleep. But people were playing SET in the hallway so I asked if I could jump in and we played a bunch of SET then instead. Every time we exhausted the deck I was like "Okay, I should go to sleep" and they were like "One more game?" Eventually I did manage to sleep.

Sunday was off the charts busy. I went to program ops at nine to print out crosswords, then co-ran the crossword meetup at 10. It was smaller than I'd hoped but a lot of fun, I solved Matt Gaffney and most of the Sunday Times, and we all talked as we solved about favorite puzzles and styles of clues and weird word things. I introduced someone to the Eggcorn database!

I ran down to the Fanzine lounge because they were doing WOOF collation and I for the first time decided to submit a contribution. More about that in another post. Then I went to the FFA meetup for about fifteen minutes before I had to go get ready for my second rpg.

I ran a Dungeon World game with the setting inspired by Piranesi's Carceri D'invenzione- not particularly by Susannah Clarke's take on the Carceri, just the artwork itself. The players were all new to Dungeon World new to Carceri and I am not so experienced as a Dungeon World DM, but I think it was well-suited and we had a good time. I had to prompt some players a bit to get them used to the Dungeon World style of taking ownership of your characters' actions, but every player got to have moments of badass and moments of struggle to overcome, so I feel good about it.

After my game, I only had half an hour before my last panel of the con, on Jewish Spaces in SFF. It wasn't a huge crowd but I think it was the panel where the conversation had the best and most satisfying flow and I was really glad to have the panel. I got to rant about my pet peeves about the MCU, everyone else got to rant about their pet peeves, it was a good time.

Then I got confused and went to my Ops shift an hour early, which was probably a good thing for Ops because prep for the lines to go into the Hugo Awards was starting and they needed all the help they could get. I'd originally intended to just work the before the Hugos line, but after surviving the chaos of that line situation I got sucked in and ended up watching the Hugos from Ops HQ and helping to direct people out of the Hugos as well. Afterward I was worn out and didn't do any of the post-Hugos stuff. But being in Ops for the Hugos was a fascinating perspective on the event and it was really rewarding. I've volunteered for cons before but never in such a public-facing way. It felt good to help people and be able to visibly see that their con experience was better for my help.

Monday I packed up and had a last Ops shift. As the con wound down, I headed over to the hotel near Midway I'm staying at while I take care of some business in Chicago tomorrow. I'm reading a bit of the latest Dresden Files book, I'm more into this one than I've been to recent past ones.

Scenes from a Worldcon

-I overheard a young woman, late teens or early twenties, holding her badge streaming down with ribbons and telling her friend "I don't know why, but for some reason these ribbons really solidify my geek cred." It was such a small moment but it delighted me. I know I bang on this almost every time I write a Worldcon post, but fuck "the greying of fandom" nonsense, what is delightful about Worldcon is so many people at so many different points in their fannish journey and we're all coming together to encourage each other to be our most authentic geek self.

-Seanan McGuire tells us she's read an advance copy of Naomi Novik's The Golden Enclaves and it is so good that it made her want to send birds to peck Novik's liver.

-I got to kick GOH Steven Barnes out of a panel room! Because he was running the previous program item before my crossword meetup and he'd run long and I needed the room, but still, I got to kick Steven Barnes out of a panel room and nobody can take that away from me.

-I want to mention this, even though I'm not entirely sure what it means. But wearing a yarmulke in Chicago, I got a lot more comments than I'm used to just walking on the street, mostly creepy philosemitism but also some legitimately nasty language. I've been to Chicago before without experiencing that, and certainly it's not like I don't sometimes encounter anti-semitism in New Jersey, but... it felt like a lot and it made me feel a little nervous.

But on the other hand, being at the con was a generally satisfying and enjoyable experience Jewishly, between the panel and the various Shabbos activities, so that balanced things out for me.

Oops! Lab Disasters and What We Learn from Them- Thursday September 1st- 1PM CDT

Fanfic Skills Beyond Writing - Friday September 2nd - 11:30AM CDT

Dungeons & Dragons One-Shot—Friday - Friday September 2nd - 2PM CDT

Sunday Morning Crossword Solvers - Sunday September 4th - 10 AM CDT

Dungeon World - Sunday September 4th - 12 PM CDT

Jewish Spaces in Movies and TV - Sunday September 4th - 4PM CDT

I feel like this represents a nice cross-section of all the ways in which I am a nerd.

fanworks is this weekend. I am very excited.

I will be modding two panels, "Ethical Norms in FanWorks Fandom" and "Does the Editor Make the Vidder?". The former is an idea I developed for DisCon that, um, was redeveloped after I stopped working on DisCon into something I was less happy with, so I'm excited to get a chance to do a panel closer to my original concept. The latter is something I tossed out as a suggestion at the last minute, I don't entirely know what I'm doing.

I will also be premiering 3 vids, two of which I'm extremely proud of and the other which I think is fun but unexceptional. And I'm so excited to see everyone else's premieres.

I've also received my preliminary schedule for Worldcon. It may change still but will hopefully be solid and announceable soon. I'm really excited about all of it, though I may have agreed to do too many things, between panels and rpgs. I've also started toying with seeing if I can put together something to include in this year's WOOF.

DisCon 3 was great fun, but I also heard a few people use the word bittersweet. Many of us had a deep, aching sense of what the Con could have been, of all the people who weren't there, of all the ideas that hadn't been executed. And we were aware that the world is not right at the moment, and that coming to the convention constituted a risk that might still prove to have been unjustified. But I got to see a lot of friends for the first time in ages, and I met amazing new people, and I really felt the joy and creativity of the SFF community.

I got to meet

primeideal in person for the first time and we solved a couple of cryptic crosswords together, after solving a number of them together online over the course of the past two years. That was really cool, especially since way more of my brain has been in puzzles lately than in SF fandom. And I got to spend a lot of quality time with

freeradical42, which was so good to have- this is only the second time I've seen them in person since 2019, and the internet doesn't do very good hugs. I also very briefly saw

ambyr.

As someone who worked as low level staff on program brainstorming, I'm extremely proud of the program that resulted, but I also wish more of the work we did could have been used. We had so many great program ideas that didn't make it past development because of limits on space and staff and panelists. I'm looking forward to watching more of the program, a good portion of which was recorded and will shortly be available for members to watch online for a few weeks. When I signed up it was with the goal of producing fanworks programming that a) did not waste time justifying the existence of fanfiction and b) was more extensive than it's been in past years, offering more cool stuff to fans of fanworks at Worldcon. We succeeded at the first task, but because of space limitations, not the second. I hope future Worldcons will do better than we did.

Favorite program stuff included plotting a better Fantastic Four movie, the Orphan Black panel, the Washington Metro Gamer Symphony Orchestra concert, and a presentation by Katie Mack on going to Mars. I also really enjoyed a conversation I got into with some other audience members after the panel on fantasy animal morphology. The question they asked was about how the existence of a Creator in a fantasy world changed what was possible for fantasy animal plausibility. The panelists kind of dismissed it, but I thought it was such an interesting question because sure you can say Yes, God can create a burrito so big He can't eat it, but, like... any theogony is going to have its own constraints on internal consistency. Gods have motivation as well as intelligence, the question you have to ask is no longer "Will this creature fit within a world with a square-cube law" but rather "Will this creature fit in a world where the God-Creator is invested in the salvation of their worshipers?" or "Will this creature fit in a world where the God-Creator is a war deity?" It led to a really interesting conversation about the place of Creation in fantasy worldbuilding.

The Hugos had a weird accident that led to them being postponed an hour, but when they actually happened the ceremony was great aside from some small technical glitches and a weirdly executed memorial scroll. It felt like it was supposed to, a celebration of the genre's best this year, an affirmation of forward progress, and I was so glad to be there. There were a lot of, just, really moving speeches from winners. We've all been through a lot the past few years, it was nice to celebrate something good for once.

After the Hugos, I had a fanvid watching party in my hotel room, which was a fascinating experience. I had some visitors who knew what vids were and were there to enjoy them, but most of my visitors had no idea what a vid was. Some of them had no interest in learning and ran away after a minute of blank stares and seeing I didn't have much in the way of food, some stayed and watched some vids, although I'm not entirely clear if they understood the idea any more after their visit. I had one woman who was probably in her late 60s or 70s who sat down, watched three or four vids without saying a word or moving her head from staring at the screen, and then left. Around 2AM a couple of big youtubers showed up and we got drunk and I made them watch

sisabet's "This Is the Song That Never Ends", the 30 minute Supernatural vid. All of it. Oh man, if watching that on its own were an experience, watching other people see it for the first time and get alternately confused and angry and amazed and singing along with the choruses and then shouting for it to be shut off was amazing and surreal. I may be a bad person.

I missed some DC friends and family I'd intended to catch, but I did drive over to see a couple of people on the way out. On the whole, driving down to DC was a mistake. Parking was such a nightmare that it cost me hours anytime I actually used my car. But I was grateful it gave us access to better Shabbos food, and the ability to stop and see friends on the way home.

Busy weekend, but mostly good.

Saturday night my Mystery Hunt team did a trial run of a new software setup for solving the Hunt remotely, and it was so, so good to solve puzzles with those awesome people again. Our software setup is going to be a bit convoluted- because of feature compatibility with our custom puzzle tracker, we're using slack for text chat and discord for voice chat- but solving puzzles together with the discord voice chat was so much fun and it felt like a pretty satisfying percentage of the actual experience of solving a puzzle in person with Palindrome, though we'll see how that scales to the actual Hunt. Even though it's going to be frustrating to have to log off for Shabbos (normally when I'm on-site, I can still help with puzzles over Shabbos by looking over someone's shoulder or doing physical puzzly stuff like runarounds that doesn't involve writing), I'm really looking forward to Hunt now. We did some more puzzling Sunday night, not because we needed the testing, just because we wanted to keep working on puzzles together.

For new people, the MIT Mystery Hunt is a puzzle competition that's taken place at MIT over their winter break for the past forty years, whose objective is to solve puzzles revealing where a coin has been hidden somewhere on MIT's campus. It started as a challenging but relatively constrained set of puzzles, but over the past decades it has evolved into a massive undertaking drawing thousands of people to MIT to solve typically ~150 inventive and challenging puzzles over the course of a weekend. Puzzles span the gamut from crosswords to jigsaws and feature many unique puzzles types developed just to challenge the people who come to Mystery Hunt- "Chaos" puzzles involve teaching yourself the grammatical features of an invented language in order to find the hidden clues in a text in that language, "Duck Konundrum" puzzles involve following elaborate step-by-step, deliberately obfuscated instruction sets to find clues revealed by the instructions.

I've been competing at the Hunt on and off since 2006, and I felt a mixture of sadness and relief when the news came out this summer that Hunt would be going remote. Obviously it is not safe to host a massive puzzle competition right now, and I am very glad that the organizers are acting responsibly while still offering a puzzle competition. But I am going to miss the experience of being on campus for Hunt.

There was also a big staff meeting for Discon 3 on Sunday, discussing possible changes to the convention's timing. If you are considering going to Worldcon next year, either virtually or in person, please fill out this survey. They are trying to get as much input as possible before making a very difficult decision.

Survey on changing the date of Discon 3

And in and amongst all that, I worked a full day on Sunday, on a side project my boss is very hopefully may become my main project sometime next year.

I have fallen a few days behind on Daf Yomi as a result but will start catching up tonight, and writing up the dafs I have learned.

I don't know if I mentioned it here, but I got frustrated with ConZealand's fanwork programming, so I sent an angry note to Discon 3's programming lead pleading with them to do better, which led to me being put on Discon's program brainstorming staff. I have been enjoying it and I am hopeful for a more diverse and interesting fanwork program schedule that will actually feel like it's designed for fanwork fans instead of treating them as outsiders. Of course, Discon is up in the air in a bunch of ways right now because of Covid and hotel uncertainty, but we're hoping to have more clarity on that soon, and in the meantime we're planning for multiple kinds of convention experience.

If you have ideas of things you'd like to see, please let me know.

Worldcon Day 5

I got back in time for the panel on fanfic, which was about as good as could be expected given the constraints of the panel topic. Good, smart panelists talking about an only moderately interesting subject. There's so much more interesting that can be said about fanfic, but I am preaching to the choir here.

Afterward I spent the next four or hours in various virtual bars and parties, videochatting with other fans and pros. These have definitely been the best part of the con for me. I drank a lot of whiskey and I filled a bookmark folder with so many recommendations and interesting historical factoids and games and academic papers to read because everyone had such interesting things to say and everyone was coming from such a different perspective.

In spite of the drinking I woke up early, took a nice leisurely bike ride because it was too damned hot to push myself, watched some replays of earlier panels from the con including a great one featuring Cory Doctorow and Ada Palmer talking about the history of censorship, and then caught a couple of ConZealand Fringe panels, including "There Was Only One Panel", which was a really fun watch.

And that was the end of my Worldcon. It was not anything like being at a Worldcon in person, but it had some really good moments and I think on the whole I am glad I decided to participate, even though there are things I am also really frustrated and angry about.

Worldcon Day 4

I got home from work, cooked Shabbos dinner and watched a livetweet of the shortest WSFS business meeting in history, then I figured out how to cast the Hugo Awards ceremony to my TV and settled in to watch. I followed the main chat on the discord and also had open a chat window with

cahn and got ready to enjoy myself for the first hour, only to have the slowly dawning realization that the awards were a disaster.

It wasn't the technical issues. The virtual ceremony was a mixture of live streaming and pre-recorded video, and people were concerned beforehand about problems with execution, but while there were a few problems, for the most part the video stream was just fine.

The problem was George RR Martin, serving as emcee in his role as ConZealand toastmaster. His pre-recorded segments were rambling and ill-judged, full of self-aggrandizement and false modesty, and even more damningly, full of encomiums to racists, fascists, and sexual abusers like John Campbell, Isaac Asimov, and Harlan Ellison. He refused to use the name Astounding Award and instead offered at nauseating length a series of fawning stories about the way that Campbell had influenced himself and the genre. After I signed off, the Hugo electorate gave Jeannette Ng a second Hugo for her speech last year in which she reminded everyone that John Campbell was a fucking fascist and it was wildly insulting to the young, diverse voices in the SFF community to give them an award with his name on it. Clearly Martin was okay with continuing to insult those young voices. Clearly he wanted to, because this was a prerecorded segment and the whole thing was premeditated. And clearly ConZealand was okay with it, because it was prerecorded and they must have had an opportunity to veto those segments that they didn't approve of.

The internet doesn't seem to be giving it quite as much attention, but Harlan Ellison and Isaac Asimov were sexual predators and the way Martin spoke about them without mentioning that was offensive as well.

It's startling to imagine Martin thought he could pass this off. If he were doing it live, the boos would have drowned out his speech within the first ten minutes, it escapes me why he thought that the virtual audience meant he could get away with it.

I just... I wish I weren't so invested in Worldcon, because it gives me so many reasons to give up on it and try to invest more of my time in fannish communities that aren't so frequently disappointing.

Worldcon day 3

2022 Worldcon site selection was announced. It will be in Chicago, not in Jeddah. Chicon 7 was my first Worldcon and I hope to return to Chicon 8.

I went to a panel on D&D featuring Cat Rambo, Paul Weimer, and Sascha Stronach, which I enjoyed. They talked a lot about D&D's position within the overall ecosystem of rpgs and how you can take best advantage of the good parts of D&D and borrow from other systems to deal with its shortcomings, and it was helpful stuff to think about as someone who is pretty consciously running a D&D campaign that does not play to D&D's strengths.

That was the only panel I went to. I then had dinner and spent the rest of my evening on video chat, in the 'virtual bar' and in some of the convention bid parties. It was fun to talk to fans from all over the world and see how life is different for everyone, and also just listen to everyone being geeky together.

morbane and

cahn poppped into the bar for some time, it was good to talk to them a bit! I liked

morbane's AO3 mug.

Second Day of Virtual Worldcon:

I watched Becky Chambers read from her upcoming fourth Wayfarers novel while eating my seudah mafseket, and then didn't do any more con. I enjoyed the reading but it was a little hard to get into, it was an early passage that gave charming portraits of life in a galactic commonwealth with many different sentient species that are comfortable interacting with each other but aware of their differences, as one would expect from a Chambers novel, but it didn't give away any of the plot. According to Chambers, this book starts right after The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet ends, so in parallel to A Closed and Common Orbit.

First day of Virtual Conzealand was fun!

I ate dinner while watching the Opening Ceremony, featuring nice pre-recorded videos from the various guests of honor.

The first panel I attended was on the possibilities of a Hugo for Best Video Game or Interactive Experience, about which I remain somewhat skeptical in spite of all my actual objections being well answered by the panelists. The award proposal is clearly well-thought out and well-designed and any obvious problems with an award like this have been thought out. And yet...

Then I hung out on discord in both chat and some casual video hangouts for a while. The discord has a virtual bar and virtual cafe with various 'tables' and a 'hallway' for popping into and video chatting. And I feel like much more than panels, that was the experience the people I talked to were searching for on the first day of Worldcon- how can I reproduce the most important part of Worldcon, seeing my friends from all over the world and meeting new people from all over the world and having conversations with them about fandom and life? I think we're still figuring it out, but I had some good conversation.

Then I went to a kaffeeklatsch with Gillian Polack, whose fiction I have not yet read. But I really liked her on a panel at Dublin Worldcon about Jewish fantasy, so I decided to join, and had a good time. She's a medievalist by training and talked a lot about wacky medieval history stuff, how to insult people in old French, and about her upcoming book pulling together medieval Jewish legend with portal fantasy and superhero mythos, which sounds awesome.

By this point it was mid-afternoon in New Zealand, but around midnight in my time zone. I popped into the DC 2021 zoom party for a few minutes and then went to sleep.

Worldcon plans, in general:

I am working this week, a 9-5 schedule on Eastern Daylight Time, so I am not going to be able to timeshift myself to participate in the con on its New Zealand schedule. But I'll be catching programming when I can in the evenings and on Sunday. There's a few panels this evening I want to catch, and I'm signed up for a kaffeeklatsch tonight with Gillian Polack.

Tomorrow night is erev Tisha B'Av, so I'm probably not going to tune into much con stuff, but I figure to be back on Thursday night. Saturday night will be the con's only panel on fanfic, and Sunday afternoon will be the Fringe panel on fanfic.

I'm not sure how much of the Hugos I'll be able to catch live. They start at 7PM Friday for me, when I will no doubt be frantically finishing getting ready for Shabbos.

I'll also be spending time in the Discord, I'm on discord a bunch anyway. Feel free to poke me there if you want to chat.

It's the first virtual Worldcon, an event whose existence is so tied to physical geography that the very idea seems ridiculous. I'm looking forward to getting as much enjoyment out of it as I can, and hoping desperately that next year's con will be able to run safely in person.

Delighted to see that Conzealand Fringe, a small unofficial group of panels organized to supplement Conzealand's official program on European time, includes this wonderfully trolly panel title:

"And There Was Only One Panel: The Joy of Fanfic, or Squeeing About Our Favorite Tropes"

Panel is to be Sunday 6PM British Standard Time.

It's hard to be too critical of ConZealand programming given the absurd circumstances under which they are undertaking the convention. And yet... :P

File 770 reports about criticism the con is facing for unequal and poorly arranged programming allotment for Hugo nominees, which seems to have as usual disproportionately affected minority Hugo nominees in a variety of ways. The con has already responded, making at least some effort to try to correct course, to their credit, but this is not the first time we've seen issues like this.

Meanwhile, my own personal bugaboo about Worldcon programming.

A Complete List of all Fanfic/Fanworks Related Programming on the Worldcon schedule

1. What Fanfiction Can Teach Genre Writers

Fanfiction’s popularity continues to grow, tapping into the special creative connection between authors and fans. What is it about this literary nexus that is so fascinating and stimulating for fans? And what might authors have to learn from fans who write it?

...

...

Yes, that's the whole list.

WE GAVE THE AO3 A HUGO LAST YEAR!!! IT WAS KIND OF A HUGE DEAL! WHY DOES WORLDCON PROGRAMMING CONTINUE TO THINK THAT FANFIC WRITERS AND READERS ARE SOME OTHER PEOPLE AND NOT AN INTEGRAL PART OF WORLDCON FANDOM? WHY DO THEY THINK THAT FANFIC IS ONLY WORTH TALKING ABOUT IN CONTEXT OF ITS RELATION TO ORIGINAL FICTION AND PRO AUTHORS?

Edit:

Oh, shit, I went back to my post about this from last year, and this is just a recycled panel description from Dublin with new panelists. WTF, Worldcon?

I have submitted my site selection ballot for the 2022 Worldcon. It involved two different log-ins to different sites both run by Worldcon NZ, it involved filling out a PDF and typing in my Worldcon 2020 member ID from one site and my voting payment PIN from the other site, and then saving and emailing the PDF to another email address, but I have done it.

It really shouldn't be this complicated. I know people have talked some about amending the rules moving forward to make electronic ballots the primary option, and I support that, but I'm not convinced that the rules as they currently exist in the Worldcon constitution required quite the level of convolution we actually had. An https webform ballot integrated with payment processing seems like it could have met all the requirements in the constitution as long as paper ballots were still accepted as an alternative, for the small handful of stubborn people who would use it.

In any case, my concerns about Saudi Arabia as a host site are sufficient that it was important that I vote against it. I'm not sure we need another Chicago convention so soon, and the year after a DC convention, but Chicago is a fine city and I had a good time at Chicon 7.

Meanwhile, from the Worldcon Mark Protection Committee's official report in the Agenda for the 2020 Worldcon Business Meeting:

The headache caused by the nomination of Archive of Our Own (“AO3”) for Best Related Work only intensified after it won the award. We received many notices of items—e.g., “4.7 million fanfics are now Hugo winners”, "Everyone Who Contributed to Fanfiction Site “Archive of Our Own” Is Now a Hugo Award Winner”, and “The most talked-about win of the night was Best Related Work, which went to Archive of Our Own. Yes, all of it. So, if you’ve written fan-fic and posted it on AO3, you won a Hugo."—none of which is accurate or the intent of the award. At least one person tried to monetize having contributed to AO3 on a book cover. Our attempts to explicate that the award was for the creation of the website has, for the most part, fallen on deaf ears, and much of our year has been taken up with exerting exert legal pressure to have pins using our marks removed from sale on Etsy and Kickstarter. (Etsy at least has been responsive to our takedown requests in the past.)

I'm disappointed by this, I really had the impression that some people had gotten talked to about how their messaging about the AO3 Hugo was counterproductive and wrongheaded, but apparently they just decided that their whining fell on 'deaf ears' and waited to get in one last salvo.

Seeking Ferret

Full Life. Full Agonies.

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All the Fanfic Panels at Worldcon 2025

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Being Mask Police

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